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Edward Tamaron
Edward Tamaron '''(c. 1890-????) was an incredibly powerful and long-lived sorcerer. Born at the end of the 19th Century on Earth-Alpha, he was repressed by his abusive family members until his hometown of Boston was visited by a dimension-traveling man known as Cyrus Sincodemius. The older man took the younger one in as a magical apprentice and provoked him into killing his family, beginning a slow descent into madness and cruelty. Tamaron later killed his Master and took over the Order of Draco, using it as a tool for his quest for power. At the beginning of the 21st Century, over a hundred years into his life, Tamaron's body was destroyed by the ancient entity known as Ska. It was during this time that he discovered his soul could exist in other bodies, and he possessed the form of James Marvel. From that point on, he was able to live on in many different forms, surviving hundreds if not thousands of years past his normal lifespan. His quest became one of revenge against minor infractions made against him, as well as one in search of ways to continue to live forever. Tamaron was also the '''First Enemy of the Multiverse, a fact that he deduced eventually. This revelation caused him to believe he was entitled to whatever he wished, whether it be tremendous magical power, or the right to kill those who opposed him. In his time he assumed many aliases, including Jadran Merkhaddo, Mocata, Alzubador, and The Sorcerer, in addition to the names of his murdered Master and those he possessed. The final fate of Tamaron, or the Tamaron Entity, remains unknown at the conclusion of the book series in which he appears, The Life of Mocata. Biography Please note: This section only examines the life of the Tamaron Entity while he was living as '''Edward Tamaron'. For the remainder of his known existence, please see the pages dedicated to his other hosts.'' Childhood, Meeting Mocata Edward Tamaron was born in 1890 on Earth-Alpha to Hugo and Julia Tamaron. He had two younger sisters and lived in a relatively upscale house in the outer edges of Boston. He was considered to be a handsome child, but his father often told him he would become hardened and ugly, like himself. His father, a priest, was an extremely oppressive man, prone to fits of abusive rage, and he was fond of beating the younger Tamaron. The boy channeled his own anger against his father into his studies, and a quiet, reserved lifestyle. His main outlet involved studies of Eastern sciences, which the ignorant, racist, and occasionally delusional Hugo believed were signs of “foreign wizardry”. Thus, Edward kept his studies a quiet matter, at least when his father was concerned. Edward was fascinated by the urban legends regarding the mage Jadran Merkhaddo, said to live in Boston, which he heard from one of the few friends he allowed himself. At some point his father learned of his interest in the wizard, and began to become even more paranoid of him. Tamaron, in return, tried to bury his increasing hatred of his father, convincing himself that he was a Christian like the rest of his family, and therefore incapable of holding a grudge. The ability to control this anger was a testament to his strong genius, which manifested early in his life. Despite his best efforts at containing his ire, he was merely making himself into something ready to explode, if given a catalyst. That trigger came in 1900, not long after Edward's tenth birthday, when “Jadran Merkhaddo” appeared to the boy. Tamaron was impressed that the figure from the local stories turned out to be real. “Merkhaddo” revealed that he was actually a sorcerer (or, rather, an Incomputare) variously called Mocata, or Cyrus Sincodemius. He offered the boy a chance to study magic by his side, which he assured him was harmless. What Tamaron did not know was that Sincodemius believed Earth-Alpha was much more “pure” than his native Earth-20181, and he had been long observing Tamaron as possessing a natural affinity for magic stronger than anything else he had seen. He desired to train the boy to a certain stage to weaken his mental barriers against belief in magic, thus allowing him to transfer his soul into his “purer” body, so as to live slightly longer and thus have a greater chance of releasing his lord Cyaegha from imprisonment. Believing magic to be akin to something from a fairy tale, the naïve Tamaron accepted Sincodemius' offer, as long as it was kept a secret from his father. For several months, Tamaron trained by Sincodemius' side, becoming good friends with members of the Order of Draco, including a clique consisting of Christopher Carlton, Conrad Caslak, and Cardoc Cunningham, as well as Yulmer Purrlzig. He was eventually sworn into the ancient records of the cult under the name “Alzubador”, which translated roughly to “Golden Glory Lord of Life and Death”. Yet, in his intense happiness, Tamaron became overconfident, and so word was leaked back to his father that he was cavorting with Merkhaddo. Hugo Tamaron flew into a wild rage upon hearing this, and waited for his son to return home from school before confronting him. What ensued would change Edward's fate forever. Hugo thrashed his son, believing him to be possessed by demons, or worse, actively trying to betray his own father. Tamaron pleaded with him but it was to no avail; Hugo had gone insane with anger and hatred. Tamaron was forced to give in to his own wrath, and with supernatural strength, he snapped his father's neck just before Hugo was prepared to shoot the boy with a revolver. To his fury, Edward saw that his mother and sisters were prepared to turn against him, when his father had been the culprit. Not thinking, he quickly gunned them down with his father's pistol, but swiftly realized what he had done. Sincodemius sensed the acts perpetrated at the Tamaron household, and quickly projected himself through Hugo Tamaron's corpse, horrifying Edward. He told him he could not afford to be lost to the Order, and so he would have to burn the house to the ground. At first, Tamaron resisted, but realized that what his Master said was true. He relented and lit the house on fire, retreating to the home of the Order to live his new life. A New Outlook, and the Death of Sincodemius For the next fifteen years, Tamaron would serve as a student of the occult. He learned to venerate Cyaegha and other gods and goddesses, and eventually became a master of psionics. However, he never quite let go of all of the anger he felt towards his family; he remembered how his mother and siblings had turned against him in the end, and how he could have always struck back against his father, but instead waited for so long. He had extreme trust in Sincodemius, but began to sense that things were not as they seemed. In fact, he began to wonder if there were powers being denied to him, as he occasionally caught glimpses of books that other members were familiar with, but that he had never seen before. He began to grow jealous of the other members, believing that they had been allowed forward while he was being held back. In 1910, his suspicions were confirmed. He overheard Yulmer Purrlzig and Sincodemius talking about how Tamaron could possibly be “the Moonchild”, a creature of intense magical power. Sincodemius denied such beliefs, and then began speaking to Purrlzig of his plans for Tamaron, which would be implemented within five years. Realizing that his entire life was a lie, Tamaron again erupted into anger. He did not wait to take his revenge on his opponent this time; a week later, he used a spell to reanimate the stuffed birds that Sincodemius kept in his office. The birds attacked Sincodemius and severely wounded him, until he incinerated them with a burst of flame. For one of the few times in his life, Sincodemius became afraid, for he could not sense his attacker. Thinking quickly, Tamaron used a telepathic suggestion to convince Sincodemius that Purrlzig had betrayed him. Purrlzig, who had recently been promoted to the rank of Master, was exiled from the Order, shamed for all time. Tamaron considered it apt revenge for Purrlzig's false friendship with him. The incident caused Tamaron to think about how to going about killing Sincodemius. He began to draw out the act in his mind, wanting to make sure that the old man knew that it was he who killed him. He decided to strike at the pinnacle of Sincodemius' success, when Sincodemius would try to possess him and steal his body. He did not know when this would be, however; yet Sincodemius would make it easy for him to determine. In 1915, Sincodemius asked for a private lesson with Tamaron. The two met, and Sincodemius told the younger man that he would finally teach him to travel between universes. For a demonstration, he took him to Earth-13151518. Tamaron was taken aback for a moment, questioning his mission for a glimmering second. Yet Sincodemius, revealing himself to be quite boastful, explained his own quest to Tamaron, saying there would be no lesson, and this Earth would be where Tamaron's soul would be dispersed, thus “killing” him. The apprentice gained control of himself long enough to reveal he had been preparing for his moment, surprising Sincodemius. Yet the older man refused to allow this to hold himself back, and he lashed out, projecting his astral form into Tamaron's psyche. Tamaron had been cultivating his own astral self for some time, and using this he started to duel his Master. Using raw barbaric strength, his considerable youth, and his endless hatred for the man who betrayed him, he easily dismembered Sincodemius, causing him to beg for mercy. In response, Tamaron trapped his now-former teacher in a nearby oak tree, to live for long centuries, unable to move and thus in unending torment; Sincodemius quickly slipped into madness, in this form. The student left the old man's corpse near the tree, to mock him by forcing him to watch his own body rot in front of him. In the fury of the battle, Tamaron had learned the secret of traveling the Multiverse, having absorbed it from Sincodemius' mind, and thus returned to Earth-Alpha. (He would return to Earth-13151518 much, much later.) However, when he arrived at the house of the Order of Draco, he realized that he had forgotten it, it being a product of the shared thoughts between the two during the fight. He viewed this as a small setback, as Sincodemius had always told him that Earth-Alpha was more “pure” than the other Earths. He considered it unlikely that he would ever find himself imprisoned in another universe, separated from Universe-Alpha's purity. Cleverly, he told the Order that he was, in fact, Sincodemius, now living in Tamaron's body with his plan having succeeded. He ruled the Order until its dissolution with his first death, sometime around 2003; at first, he masqueraded as the vanquished Sincodemius, but after the older members of the Order died, he became more lax with matters regarding his identity. Eventually, new recruits would just be introduced to the new Master as “Master Tamaron” or “Master Alzubador”. Doctor Cryptos Tamaron began to find his new existence boring, and spent most of his time pouring over Sincodemius' books. He was angered to find that Sincodemius never recorded either the method of traveling between universes, or the exact process of transferring oneself into a new body. He attempted to train himself in the ways of both, with little success. Roughly twenty-two years after he defeated Sincodemius, in 1937, he was contacted by a strange figure, who resembled an empty red robe. The figure revealed itself to be the King of Time, who sought Tamaron's assistance in defeating a superhero named Doctor Cryptos. Cryptos was apparently the nemesis of the King of Time, and the King, who possessed the power to travel through time at will, revealed that he knew Tamaron would grow up to be “hugely important”. Thus, he wanted magical power by his side in a coming battle against Cryptos. Tamaron agreed, if anything to quench his thirst for action. Tamaron was taken to a sewer where a number of psychiatric patients dressed as “cultists” had been set up. Several of them had murdered a number of prominent individuals, supposedly in the name of “the Devil”. They had also been ordered to steal things by the King of Time, to give it a less fatal touch, and to set up the idea that two criminals were at work. Tamaron asked why he had been insistent on making it look so clearly like a solvable mystery, to which the King of Time replied that things had already been laid out according to “the clichés”; Tamaron realized the trips through time had rendered the King, whatever he or it was, relatively insane. The King of Time then insisted that Tamaron had to choose a “villain name”, and, feeling lackluster, Tamaron chose “The Sorcerer”. He was then encouraged, when Cryptos and his “Secret Society” arrived, to act as campy as possible, to “fit the theme”. In spite of his confusion, Tamaron acted as he was instructed; however, his “cultists” were overwhelmed, and he was caught off guard by Cryptos himself. When he awoke, he was in a jail cell, and found out that the King of Time had escaped. More annoyed and baffled than angry, his bail was paid quietly by one of the Order members, and things returned to the usual. Still, the incident had had wider reaching consequences on the Multiverse than Tamaron had first envisioned. For him, it had seeded some anger against Doctor Cryptos, which would be twisted into something far greater later on. Encounter with Doktor Ebersbach By 1946, the appearance of “The Sorcerer” had been forgotten, and the complicated link Tamaron had with the thefts and murders was mostly ascribed to the King of Time. Nevertheless, a file had been collected on Tamaron by the U.S. government, and he had been considered for petitioning to ask for occult assistance during World War II. For various bureaucratic reasons, he was never asked. He had kept himself busy nonetheless during the War, entertaining himself with a copy of Dionysus Whateley's [[Satan on Horseback]], and with certain divination rituals to discover the nature of other Earths, during which he came in contact with a Nazi occultist named Karl Gerber, though he did not understand the significance of learning of Gerber at the time. During this time, he was also attacked by Yulmer Purrlzig, and the two began a long-winded magical war. This would continue until Purrlzig's death in 1972. It was in 1946 that Tamaron was contacted by G., a representative from the former OSS, now the CIA. G. had been placed in charge of interviewing Doktor Helmold Ebersbach, a captured Nazi scientist who was believed to have ties to the occult. His remarks were overall incredibly cryptic, referring to “Hyperborea”, “Thule”, and the Dark Mob, and could not be easily deciphered. Tamaron agreed to help facilitate the interview. However, the interview was still generally pointless. It was Ebersbach's opinion that the Aryans that the Nazis believed in were descended from Hyperboreans, who were in turn descended from extraterrestrial presences that also fathered the Dark Mob. Hitler had been searching for the Dark Mob through Ebersbach, but the latter had hidden his discoveries from the former. The resulting collection of magical artifacts—which Ebersbach believed were charged with “vril” energy—had allowed him to access certain mind-control spells and techniques that had been experimented with in the concentration camps. Tamaron was skeptical of this, never having much faith in the sanity of the Nazis, and thus dismissed the claims made by the scientist. However, G. hinted that the idea of achieving mind-control using psionics and hypnotism, in tandem with medicine, could prove very useful in the days ahead. Return of The Sorcerer In 1956, a newspaper headline reached the home of the Order of Draco, which suggested that “The Sorcerer” had clashed again with the still-active Doctor Cryptos. Tamaron was enraged, believing that he would be reexamined by the law, and so he started to look into the matter. It was here that he discovered three important details: the first being that this imposter Sorcerer was, in fact, Yulmer Purrlzig, attempting to defame his old foe. The second was that he himself was considered to be legally dead, at the age of sixty-six. The third, related to the second, was that he was not biologically aging. He began to wonder if this was due to contact with the chronal energies of the King of Time, or if his magic was preserving him, or both. Over the ensuing decades he learned that he was fundamentally immortal, but this would lead to his first major downfall, born of arrogance. Ten years after the false Sorcerer was captured, Doctor Cryptos and the King of Time supposedly killed each other in Vietnam. The Secret Society of Doctor Cryptos disbanded, but their absence would be filled by another presence. Superheroes and Magical War During the late '60s, occultism began to rise up again as young hippies began to become interested in New Age-style magic. The Order of Draco became full of incoming members, and was more prosperous than ever. Word began to spread of the Order again, and several rumors eventually reached the young, rebellious “Satanist Detective”, Zay Arkmoor. Arkmoor did some research into the Order and declared himself an enemy of Tamaron. The two began a long-range mystical duel, which added to the burden of fighting Purrlzig as well. But the stress did not stop here; a third opponent appeared to begin another battle. This was Hazel Hexen, a crazed apprentice of Harold Coppola, who was in turn an associate of Cyrus Sincodemius, and an “inner circle” Incomputare Master. Hexen was obsessed with the Moonchild idea that Tamaron had encountered years earlier, and believed that she needed to kill other living sorcerers to allow the Moonchild to come into being. Tamaron had been on her list for a long time, and thus she spontaneously targeted him. Ultimately, Tamaron would outlive all of his foes but her. In 1969, an attempt by Tamaron to free the lord of his Master, Cyaegha, went awry, and he accidentally brought through a tentacled creature that manifested in the Nevada desert. Zay Arkmoor appeared to battle it, but was joined by Captain Future, who had been a member of the Secret Society of Doctor Cryptos; Spaceman, who claimed to be an alien from the 41st Century; and the Cyan Skull, a lunatic who said he was from another dimension. Apparently, the creature that had been summoned had bent time and space, bringing the group together. With their combined powers, they managed to defeat the beast, and afterward decided to remain in that era as a superhero team called Glory. Although the team never interfered with Tamaron or the Order of Draco, The Sorcerer saw them as a potential nuisance, containing two of his foes in the form of Zay Arkmoor and Captain Future, the latter whom having been friends with Doctor Cryptos. He was not aware of it at the time, but the Cyan Skull was also one of his future enemies: the reporter known as Clayton Stone. In 1970, the team gathered aboard [[L'Ombre]], a submarine owned by Captain Mysterieux, a French adventuress, to meet with Captain Cosmos, a washed up 1940s superhero who had been casual rivals with Doctor Cryptos. Cosmos, whose powers were derived from an ancient “Sumerian” rod—actually a super-scientific alien artifact, known as the Rod of Wonder—went insane and tried to kill those present, but was contained. Glory decided to disband after this, and went their separate ways. Spaceman returned to his home era; Captain Future went off in search of Doctor Cryptos, whom he believed to merely be missing; with the locations of Captain Mysterieux and the Cyan Skull remaining unknown. Two years later, Zay Arkmoor decided to join a military operation led by the second man to be called G. He ended up investigating the facility where Cryptos and the King of Time had their last battle, where he apparently died. In this same year, Yulmer Purrlzig died of old age in London. The feeling of success over the deaths of two of his enemies left Tamaron rolling in arrogance. He somehow felt responsible for their deaths and often gloated about the idea to his followers. He was also incredibly proud over his summoning of the tentacle-creature, and began to seriously investigate more entities that could be summoned, to perhaps secure bargains for more power. It was here that he truly began to see himself as the future ruler of the world. Endgame Through the '70s, '80s, and '90s, the Order of Draco began to move towards bringing about its own secrecy. During the '80s, the Chaos Magick movement began to take hold, which allowed a small handful of members into the Order. However, Tamaron, taking a cue from the King of Time, decided to act campier during this time to suggest to people that the Order was something more akin to a stage magician club than anything else. With the Satanic abuse panic in the '90s, the Order became less of a driving magical force and more of an urban legend; but the energies generated by the urban myths were used by the Order to begin a new project. In the late '70s, Tamaron had discovered Ska, a sort of “literature-demon” that had been bound to the town of Astaroth, Vermont; tripping on his pride, he decided to summon Ska and reap whatever benefits would arise from such a thing. He believed that perhaps Ska could help him become something which Sincodemius had called the “Kran Kôr”, or “Immortal with Reaching Hands”, a title which he would become obsessed with in later years. Around 1975 he moved out of Boston, leaving behind the home he had lived in for over seven decades. Using his influence, and some of his telepathic power, Tamaron managed to purchase the property that the supposed “Tomb of Ska” lay on top of, and began to attempt to communicate with the entity. He remained unsuccessful, mostly due to his own laziness, for over thirty years. Overall, he participated in petty rituals to draw mundane amounts of magic from the Tomb, though these had little purpose. There is some evidence to suggest that during this period, Tamaron started using drugs for recreational purposes, a habit that continued into his next few lives. When he was in Astaroth, he portrayed himself as little more than an eccentric, acting over the top as often as possible. It was during this time that he started buying candles from the shop of Jack Jones, who was similarly theatrically, acting under the name of “Hjalmar Mandrake”. Tamaron was unaware that “Mandrake” was the unknowing possessor of the Vital Spirit, a creature created by Yulmer Purrlzig sometime before his death, to vex Tamaron. Jones would eventually provoke the undoing of Tamaron, and many other holders of the Spirit after him would contribute to his downfall as well. In 2003, a writer appeared in Astaroth, seeking the old legends of the town as inspiration for a new horror story. It had been Ska's energies leaking into the surrounding area that had caused the town to become such a nexus for urban myths. During his stay in the town, the writer became friends with a man named Hank, and reunited with an old friend named Allan. The two introduced him to Hjalmar Mandrake, who joined their company. Hank, who had known of Tamaron for some time, decided to take the group to meet him face-to-face, an idea that Mandrake agreed to. Tamaron decided to put on a show for the group, as he often did when people went to his home. Feeling confident, he showed them the Tomb of Ska, admitting that he planned to release the ancient god when he had the power to do so. Yet this resulted in a reaction different than anything else before; Allan, for his own personal biases, flew into a rage, declaring that the Order was fake and their religion with it. Tamaron had not had any sort of argument with anyone for years, and this sent him into a rage as well. Somehow, Allan reminded him of many of his old enemies, if anything because he opposed him—and by now, the Sorcerer had become obsessed with destroying anyone who tried to stop him in any way. He vowed that that night he would unleash Ska and kill everyone in Astaroth as revenge for even this minor criticism. Dipping into his rage, as he had when he dueled with Sincodemius, and when he had waged war with Arkmoor, Purrlzig, and Hexen, he managed to open the stone slab that contained both the material and astral aspects of Ska. The creature was free once more, but was not open to obeying Tamaron. Instead, it killed all of the members of the Order of Draco and violently displaced Tamaron from his body. It was the first time had been truly severed from his body since his battle with his old Master, and the shock sealed him away from repossessing his physical form. He could only watch as Ska used it to work magics that turned Astaroth into a nexus for horror-story energy; the place became full of horrible monsters, and many of the locals went mad or died. Tamaron was swept into the fray of this as well, forced to deal with mind-warping hallucinations, and attacks by astral beasts summoned by Ska. Eventually, after the deaths of Allan and Hank, the writer and Hjalmar Mandrake returned to Tamaron's house to confront Ska. Tamaron watched as they began a mind-battle with the entity, which attracted the attentions of The Predator, an ancient enemy of Ska's. The Predator struck by fusing with the ghosts of the people Ska killed, including Allan and Hank, and Ska was apparently destroyed. However, this created a pulse of energy which burned Tamaron's body to ash. The writer and Mandrake escaped, though they would be forever haunted by what they had witnessed. Tamaron was nearly killed by the shock of his body's destruction, and he was similarly almost driven into madness. He was forced to flee into the night in an attempt to find a new body, which he managed to succeed with in the form of James Marvel. Personality and Traits Please note: This section only concerns personality traits that the Tamaron Entity possessed during his time in his first body. To chart the changes in his mannerisms over the course of the rest of his life, please see the pages dedicated to his other hosts. Edward Tamaron changed greatly over the course of his one-hundred and thirteen-year lifespan. He started out a relatively happy, if repressed child, and slowly became more and more hateful as time went on. This was inspired by a string of deep-cutting betrayals he suffered at the hands of people he cared about; these betrayals eventually caused him to trust no one, and eventually, to care about no one but himself. He viewed those who offended him in the slightest not as obstacles or challenges, but as frustrations to be destroyed immediately and as violently as possible. He saw his magical war with Yulmer Purrlzig, which took up decades of his life, as a personal failure in efficiency that he sought to correct with future foes. He often pondered how he should have avoided settling for Purrlzig's exile from the Order of Draco, and should have instead simply murdered him. This obsession with efficiency stemmed also from a type of self-hatred born from his killing of his family. Though he did not regret striking down his father, he had genuinely loved his sisters and mother, which made their betrayal of him even harsher. He believed, at least subconsciously, that he deserved to be punished; and he believed this nearly as much as he believed he was entitled to absolute rule over the world. He only lapsed from a desire to strike quickly when he grew old and turned to a mild drug habit to take away some of the buried stress of essentially being immortal. He would reflect, in some of his later hosts, on how hard he had worked to make sure he never noticed how difficult it was to live for such a long time. Tamaron remained both physically and mentally locked in the age at which he learned of Sincodemius' betrayal of him. As such, he often acted like an angry young man, and would remain so for the rest of his existence. He also aged little between the incident and his contact with the King of Time, wherein he gained his immortality. The writer who came to Astaroth was struck instantly by how young Tamaron looked physically, while somehow sensing that inside, he was actually a much more ancient creature. Tamaron was very good at seducing people to his wishes, and had no qualms about using many different means of persuasion to deal with both men and women. However, he considered himself to be asexual, and when he did have sex or engaged in seemingly romantic pursuits, he did so joylessly, and for political purposes only. Considering himself to be above everyone else, he did not believe that there could be anyone whom he could have a genuine relationship with. Though he was content with torturing or slowly murdering someone, he refused to delve into sexual violence of any kind, believing it to not only be grotesque, but unnecessary, and counter-efficient. During his time as James Marvel or Tsutomu Warren, however, he began to engage in sexual perversity simply because it brought him a new thrill of self-conscious cruelty. Trivia * The name “Edward Tamaron”, like the names of many of Tamaron's hosts, is probably meant to be a reference. “Edward” recalls Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan occultist who was an associate of the famed John Dee. “Tamaron” recalls the surname “Cameron”, which is a Gaelic name meaning “crooked nose”. This could be a reference to the crookedness of Tamaron's character. * Tamaron's magical name, “Alzubador”, is a dual reference. In the story itself, it is explained that the name breaks down into “Al”, meaning “El”, the “Lord of Canaan”; “Zuba”, a slurring of “Vuda”, for “Javuto, the Death-Lord”; and “dor”, meaning “gold”. The reference to “Javuto” is one directed at one of the vampires from the Italian horror film [[Wikipedia:Black Sunday|''Black Sunday (1960)]], by Mario Bava; this is one of the first of many references to obscure horror films in the course of the ''Life of Mocata ''series. The name itself is the name of an evil god from another Italian horror film, Lucio Fulci's ''Manhattan Baby ''(1982). * The scene in which Tamaron attacks Sincodemius with stuffed birds is also a reference to ''Manhattan Baby; at the end of the film, the heroic occultist, Adrian Marcato, is pecked to death by birds controlled by Alzubador. Sincodemius' other name, “Jadran Merkhaddo”, is meant to be a reference to Adrian Marcato, which was also the name of the Satanist from Ira Levin's ''Rosemary's Baby ''(1967), and the 1968 film of the same name. * The Author's Notes at the back of the first book mention that Tamaron's story in Astaroth was born out of an early attempt to write a novel called ''How Eerie It ''Is. When that fell through, he reused the Tamaron character, and eventually, the plot of the novel itself, to start off the series as part of a world-building exercise, which eventually led to the Reunion Project. Sources and Appearances * ''The Life of Mocata ''(entire series) * Author's Notes